Monthly Archives: March 2015

At 8 am on Tuesday March 17th 1885, Henry Kimberley was the first man to be executed within the walls of Birmingham prison. The press reported that the hangman was James Berry of Bradford and that ‘the sentence could scarcely have been carried out better than it was’. Kimberley was said to have shown ‘unexpected fortitude’.

Henry Kimberley was a 53 year old screw-tool maker, described as being ‘thick-set, about 5ft 6in high, with a low beetling forehead above which rises a tangled mass of brown hair, the lower part of his face being long and thin with a slight moustache’. The press reported that he looked older than 53, adding that his wife had claimed he was ‘nearer 60’. Kimberley had been separated from his wife for many years and had been cohabiting with 39 year old Harriet Steward for at least 17 years at 24, Pershore Rd. Although they…

Did you see the eclipse today (March 20th, 2015)? Or was it obscured by cloud?

In Victorian Birmingham, the eclipse of 1858 was observed through cloud and what we would now describe as ‘smog’. Smoke pollution, more often associated with the large factory towns of the North, was also a significant problem in Birmingham from early in the nineteenth century. It had been highlighted as a feature of the town by Mr. Pickwick (in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, serialised in 1836), describing the volumes of dense smoke issuing heavily forth from high toppling chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything around’. The town’s various authorities had taken some measures against the ‘nuisance’, introducing bye-laws and very occasional prosecutions of the most persistent perpetrators. But they seemed reluctant to interfere in local business and the pollution prevailed through much of the century.